War in Heaven (Chap. 1: The Prelude

The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there
was no-one in the room but the corpse.

A few moments later there was. Lionel Rackstraw, strolling back from
lunch, heard in the corridor the sound of the bell in his room, and,
entering at a run, took up the receiver. He remarked, as he did so, the
boots and trousered legs sticking out from the large knee-hole table at
which he worked, but the telephone had established the first claim on
his attention.

"Yes," he said, "yes...No, not before the 17th...No, who cares
what he wants?...No, who wants to know?...Oh, Mr. Persimmons. Oh,
tell him the 17th...Yes...Yes, I'll send a set down."

He put the receiver down and looked back at the boots.

It occurred to him that someone was probably doing something to the
telephone; people did, he knew, at various times drift in on him for
such purposes. But they usually looked round or said something; and this
fellow must have heard him talking. He bent down towards the boots.

"Shall you be long?" he said into the space between the legs and the
central top drawer; and then, as there was no answer, he walked away,
dropped hat and gloves and book on to their shelf, strolled back to his
desk, picked up some papers and read them, put them back, and, peering
again into the dark hole, said more impatiently, "Shall you be long?"

No voice replied; not even when, touching the extended foot with his
own, he repeated the question. Rather reluctantly he went round to the
other side of the table, which was still darker, and, trying to make out
the head of the intruder, said almost loudly: "Hallo! hallo! What's the
idea?" Then, as nothing happened, he stood up and went on to himself:
"Damn it all, is he dead?" and thought at once that he might be.

That dead bodies did not usually lie round in one of the rooms of a
publisher's offices in London about half-past two in the afternoon was a
certainty that formed now an enormous and cynical background to the
fantastic possibility. He half looked at the door which he had closed
behind him, and then attempted the same sort of interior recovery with
which he had often thrown off the knowledge that at any moment during
his absence his wife _might_ be involved in some street accident, some
skidding bus or swerving lorry. These things happened--a small and
unpleasant, if invisible, deity who lived in a corner of his top shelves
had reminded him--these things happened, and even _now_ perhaps...
People had been crushed against their own front doors; there had been a
doctor in Gower Street. Of course, it was all untrue. But this time, as
he moved to touch the protruding feet, he wondered if it were.

The foot he touched apparently conveyed no information to the stranger's
mind, and Lionel gave up the attempt. He went out and crossed the
corridor to another office, whose occupant, spread over a table, was
marking sentences in newspaper cuttings.

"Mornington," Lionel said, "there's a man in my room under the table,
and I can't get him to take any notice. Will you come across? He looks,"
he added in a rush of realism, "for all the world as if he was dead."

"How fortunate!" Mornington said, gathering himself off the table. "If
he were alive and had got under your table and wouldn't take any notice
I should be afraid you'd annoyed him somehow. I think that's rather a
pleasant notion," he went on as they crossed the corridor, "a sort of
modern _King's Threshold_--get under the table of the man who's insulted
you and simply sulk there. Not, I think, starve--that's for more
romantic ages than ours--but take a case filled with sandwiches and a
thermos...What's the plural of thermos?..." He stared at the feet,
and then, going up to the desk, went down on one knee and put a hand
over the disappearing leg. Then he looked up at Lionel.

"Something wrong," he said sharply. "Go and ask Dalling to come here."
He dropped to both knees and peered under the table.

Lionel ran down the corridor in the other direction, and returned in a
few minutes with a short man of about forty-five, whose face showed more
curiosity than anxiety. Mornington was already making efforts to get the
body from under the table.

"He must be dead," he said abruptly to the others as they came in. "What
an incredible business! Go round the other side, Dalling; the buttons
have caught in the table or something; see if you can get them loose."

"Hadn't we better leave it for the police?" Dalling asked. "I thought
you weren't supposed to move bodies."

"How the devil do I know whether it is a body?" Mornington asked. "Not
but what you may be right." He made investigations between the trouser-leg
and the boot, and then stood up rather suddenly. "It's a body right
enough," he said. "Is Persimmons in?"

"No," said Dalling; "he won't be back till four."

"Well, we shall have to get busy ourselves, then. Will you get on to the
police-station? And, Rackstraw, you'd better drift about in the corridor
and stop people coming in, or Plumpton will be earning half a guinea by
telling the _Evening News_."

Plumpton, however, had no opportunity of learning what was concealed
behind the door against which Lionel for the next quarter of an hour or
so leant, his eyes fixed on a long letter which he had caught up from
his desk as a pretext for silence if anyone passed him. Dalling went
downstairs and out to the front door, a complicated glass arrangement
which reflected every part of itself so many times that many arrivals
were necessary before visitors could discover which panels swung back to
the retail sales-room, which to a waiting-room for authors and others
desiring interviews with the remoter staff, and which to a corridor
leading direct to the stairs. It was here that he welcomed the police
and the doctor, who arrived simultaneously, and going up the stairs to
the first floor he explained the situation.

At the top of these stairs was a broad and deep landing, from which
another flight ran backwards on the left-hand to the second floor.
Opposite the stairs, across the landing, was the private room of Mr.
Stephen Persimmons, the head of the business since his father's
retirement some seven years before. On either side the landing narrowed
to a corridor which ran for some distance left and right and gave access
to various rooms occupied by Rackstraw, Mornington, Dalling, and others.
On the right this corridor ended in a door which gave entrance to
Plumpton's room. On the left the other section, in which Lionel's room
was the last on the right hand, led to a staircase to the basement. On
its way, however, this staircase passed and issued on a side door
through which the visitor came out into a short, covered court, having a
blank wall opposite, which connected the streets at the front and the
back of the building. It would therefore have been easy for anyone to
obtain access to Lionel's room in order, as the inspector in charge
remarked pleasantly to Mornington, "to be strangled."

For the dead man had, as was evident when the police got the body clear,
been murdered so. Lionel, in obedience to the official request to see if
he could recognize the corpse, took one glance at the purple face and
starting eyes, and with a choked negative retreated. Mornington, with a
more contemplative, and Dalling with a more curious, interest, both in
turn considered and denied any knowledge of the stranger. He was a
little man, in the usual not very fresh clothes of the lower middle
class; his bowler hat had been crushed in under the desk; his pockets
contained nothing but a cheap watch, a few coppers, and some silver--
papers he appeared to have none. Around his neck was a piece of stout
cord, deeply embedded in the flesh.

So much the clerks heard before the police with their proceedings
retired into cloud and drove the civilians into other rooms. Almost as
soon, either by the telephone or some other means, news of the discovery
reached Fleet Street, and reporters came pushing through the crowd that
began to gather immediately the police were seen to enter the building.
The news of the discovered corpse was communicated to them officially,
and for the rest they were left to choose as they would among the
rumours flying through the crowd, which varied from vivid accounts of
the actual murder and several different descriptions of the murderer to
a report that the whole of the staff were under arrest and the police
had had to wade ankle-deep through the blood in the basement.

To such a distraction Mr. Persimmons himself returned from a meeting of
the Publishers' Association about four o'clock, and was immediately
annexed by Inspector Colquhoun, who had taken the investigation in
charge. Stephen Persimmons was rather a small man, with a mild face apt
to take on a harassed and anxious appearance on slight cause. With much
more reason he looked anxious now, as he sat opposite the inspector in
his own room. He had recognized the body as little as any of his staff
had, and it was about them rather than it that the inspector was anxious
to gain particulars.

"This Rackstraw, now," Colquhoun was saying: "it was his room the body
was found in. Has he been with you long?"

"Oh, years," Mr. Persimmons answered; "most of them have. All the people
on this floor--and nearly all the rest. They've been here longer than
me, most of them. You see, I came in just three years before my father
retired--that's seven years ago, and three's ten."

"And Rackstraw was here before that?"

"Oh, yes, certainly."

"Do you know anything of him?" the inspector pressed. "His address,
now?"

"Dalling has all that," the unhappy Persimmons said. "He has all the
particulars about the staff. I remember Rackstraw being married a few
years ago."

"And what does he do here?" Colquhoun went on.

"Oh, he does a good deal of putting books through, paper and type and
binding, and so on. He rather looks after the fiction side. I've taken
up fiction a good deal since my father went; that's why the business has
expanded so. We've got two of the best selling people to-day--Mrs.
Clyde and John Bastable."

"Mrs. Clyde," the inspector brooded. "Didn't she write 'The Comet and
the Star'?"

"That's the woman. We sold ninety thousand," Persimmons answered.

"And what are your other lines?"

"Well, my father used to do, in fact he began with, what you might call
occult stuff. Mesmerism and astrology and histories of great sorcerers,
and that sort of thing. It didn't really pay very well."

"And does Mr. Rackstraw look after that too?" asked Colquhoun.

"Well, some of it," the publisher answered. "But of course, in a place
like this things aren't exactly divided just--just exactly. Mornington,
now, Mornington looks after some books. Under me, of course," he added
hastily. "And then he does a good deal of the publicity, the
advertisements, you know. And he does the reviews."

"What, writes them?" the inspector asked.

"Certainly not," said the publisher, shocked. "Reads them and chooses
passages to quote. Writes them! Really, inspector!"

"And how long has Mr. Mornington been here?" Colquhoun went on.

"Oh, years and years. I tell you they all came before I did."

"I understand Mr. Rackstraw was out a long time at lunch to-day, with
one of your authors. Would that be all right?"

"I daresay he was," Persimmons said, "if he said so."

"You don't _know_ that he was?" asked Colquhoun. "He didn't tell you?"

"Really, inspector," the worried Persimmons said again, "do you think my
staff ask me for an hour off when they want to see an author? I give
them their work and they do it."

"Sir Giles Tumulty," the inspector said. "You know him?"

"We're publishing his last book, 'Historical Vestiges of Sacred Vessels
in Folklore'. The explorer and antiquarian, you know. Rackstraw's had a
lot of trouble with his illustrations, but he told me yesterday he
thought he'd got them through. Yes, I can quite believe he went up to
see him. But you can find out from Sir Giles, can't you?"

"What I'm getting at," the inspector said, "is this. If any of your
people are out, is there anything to prevent anyone getting into any of
their rooms? There's a front way and a back way in and nobody on watch
anywhere."

"There's a girl in the waiting-room," Persimmons objected.

"A girl!" the inspector answered. "Reading a novel when she's not
talking to anyone. She'd be a lot of good. Besides, there's a corridor
to the staircase alongside the waiting-room. And at the back there's
no-one."

"Well, one doesn't expect strangers to drop in casually," the publisher
said unhappily. "I believe they do lock their doors sometimes, if they
have to go out and have to leave a lot of papers all spread out."

"And leave the key in, I suppose?" Colquhoun said sarcastically.

"Of course," Persimmons answered. "Suppose I wanted something. Besides,
it's not to keep anyone out; it's only just to save trouble and warn
anyone going in to be careful, so to speak; it hardly ever happens.
Besides--"

Colquhoun cut him short. "What people mean by asking for a Government of
business men, I don't know," he said. "I was a Conservative from
boyhood, and I'm stauncher every year the more I see of business.
There's nothing to prevent anyone coming in."

"But they don't," said Persimmons.

"But they have," said Colquhoun. "It's the unexpected that happens. Are
you a religious man, Mr. Persimmons?"

"Well, not--not exactly religious," the publisher said hesitatingly.
"Not what you'd call religious unpleasantly, I mean. But what--"

"Nor am I," the inspector said. "And I don't get the chance to go to
church much. But I've been twice with my wife to a Sunday evening
service at her Wesleyan Church in the last few months, and it's a
remarkable thing, Mr. Persimmons, we had the same piece read from the
Bible each time. It ended up--'And what I say unto you I say unto all,
Watch.' It seemed to me fairly meant for the public. 'What I say unto
you,' that's us in the police, 'I say unto all, Watch.' If there was
more of that there'd be fewer undiscovered murders. Well, I'll go and
see Mr. Balling. Good day, Mr. Persimmons."